de, which is
not to be wondered at. MM. de Richelieu, though gentlemen of good
standing, had never built a town; they had been content with their
village and with a mediocre house. At the present time it is the most
beautiful and most magnificent castle you could possibly see, and all the
ornament that could be given to a house is found there. This will not be
difficult to believe if one considers that it is the work of the most
ambitious and most ostentatious man in the world, premier minister of
state too, who for a long while possessed absolute authority over
affairs. It is, nevertheless, inconceivable that the apartments should
correspond so ill in size with the beauty of the outside. I hear that
this arose from the fact that the cardinal wished to have the chamber
preserved in which he was born. To adjust the house of a simple
gentleman to the grand ideas of the most powerful favorite there has ever
been in France, you will observe that the architect must have been
hampered; accordingly he did not see his way to planning any but very
small quarters, which, by way of recompense, as regards gilding or
painting, lack no embellishment inside.

"Amidst all that modern invention has employed to embellish it, there are
to be seen, on the chimney-piece in a drawingroom, the arms of Cardinal
Richelieu, just as they were during the lifetime of his father, which the
cardinal desired to leave there, because they comprise a collar of the
Holy Ghost, in order to prove to those who are wont to misrepresent the
origin of favorites that he was born a gentleman of a good house. In
this point, he imposed upon nobody."

The castle of Richelieu is well nigh destroyed; his family, after falling
into poverty, is extinct; the Palais-Cardinal has assumed the name of
Palais-Royal; and pure monarchy, the aim of all his efforts and the work
of his whole life, has been swept away by the blast of revolution. Of
the cardinal there remains nothing but the great memory of his power and
of the services he rendered his country. Evil has been spoken, with good
reason, of glory; it lasts, however, more durably than material successes
even when they rest on the best security. Richelieu had no conception of
that noblest ambition on which a human soul can feed, that of governing a
free country, but he was one of the greatest, the most effective, and the
boldest, as well as the most prudent servants that France ever had.

Cardinal Richelieu ga